User talk:MinorStoop
Welcome! Hello MinorStoop, and welcome to the Kung Fu Panda Wiki! We're very excited to have you join and participate in our online community. I see you've already made an edit to the User talk:Spottedstar page, and for that we thank you. :) Before getting started on editing other pages, please take the time to look at our site policies. These will tell you exactly how things work around here, as well as what is and isn't allowed on this site. I encourage you to take the time to familiarize yourself with our regulations, as these are currently in effect for all users on this wiki. Also, if you're fairly new to wikis, I invite you to check out the wiki tutorial. Hopefully this will be able to walk you through the normal workings of wikis, and also answer any questions you may have. Feel free to test out what you learn in the wiki's sandbox. Other than that, you're good to go! I hope you decide to stay; although this wiki isn't entirely new, it needs all the active members it can get. I also hope to get to know you better as time passes and we edit stuff around the community. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks and have fun! :) -- Spottedstar (Talk) 14:47, February 15, 2012 Re:Blocking policies for IPs Hi MinorStoop. :) I'm actually glad you brought this up. Honestly, the only reason IPs were set to an infinite block is because some other wikis (particularly popular ones with many anonymous contributors) use the same policy. And that has to do with me setting up the wiki's policies back when I first adopted it. Let's see if I can recap the blocking policy story in a nutshell: The block duration for this wiki was created back when I first took over the wiki about a year and a half ago. Having been vandalized many times before then (as well as lacking any basic structure with its articles), the wiki desperately needed a solid set of policies to help sustain order. I suppose I became scared that all this effort I planned on putting into the wiki might be ruined by vandals, so to keep most of them away, I thought it would be a good idea to enforce a permanent IP block. As I have observed on other wiki and in my time on here since then, it seems to work - vandalism is kept well under control, particularly around here. But now that the wiki is stable and has sound structure, I suppose it is time for a different block duration policy... I am aware that IP addresses can change. But with that in perspective of the block durations, it seemed like there was really no way to allow everyone to edit the wiki and keep all the vandals permanently away. It seemed to me like one of those things where I had to sacrifice something for the "greater good" of the wiki. (Which, of course, makes me sound like a power-hungry dictator - great...) But that's why I think you're right - it's not fair to other people who happen to obtain a blocked IP address and can't edit the wiki. I'll definitely take into consideration revising the block durations, but in the end it's probably not going to be satisfactory with everyone; either way, a troublesome IP user will have to be blocked for an extensive amount of time. I hope all that made sense - sometimes I have so many thoughts that I can't organize them all fluently! But thanks for "bringing this to the light" - I honestly wouldn't have thought about this unless someone else mentioned it. Hope to see you around! :) 01:37, February 16, 2012 (UTC)